In many industries, including telecommunications, information storage and exchange industries, there is an increasing need for reliable cooling of manufacturing equipment and data centers with racks of servers. A failure of the manufacturing equipment can lead to costly plant shutdown, while a failure in cooling equipment can lead to failures in the servers, which can mean downtime for mission critical software and hardware failure for customer web application software. These facilities may need to support a temperature range from room temperature (25 degrees C.) down to a cryogenic temperature as low as −150 degrees C.
As businesses grow and expand, facility power services are being pushed to their design limits where all available electrical service is consumed for manufacturing, operations and production. With increases in manufacturing or service activity, tremendous heat is generated inside the facility. The heat needs to be effectively removed without diverting electrical power from existing manufacturing and operational activities.
A continuing need exists for improved air conditioning systems for buildings, particularly large, multi-room and multi-level buildings, e.g., schools, office buildings, hospitals and sports facilities, such as arenas. A variety of air conditioning systems have been proposed and developed, including those described in earlier patents identified on the cover page of this patent. Persons skilled in the art have recognized various challenges in designing systems that can be used to control the inside air temperatures in common areas and different rooms of those buildings. However, installing air conditioning systems and the components of air conditioning systems presents challenges as well. Installing an air conditioning system is not as simple as it might appear, particularly when the air conditioning system is associated with a building that has numerous rooms, each requiring individual temperature control. Installing air conditioning systems for large buildings and building systems is often highly complex, requiring the selection and coordination of air conditioning equipment, control systems, electrical switchgear, building materials and supplies, and also organizing the various subcontractors and construction workers, and securing building permits, etc.
US Patent Application 20040016245 discloses a packaged chilling system for providing chilled water to an air conditioning system for a building where a prepackaged water chilling system is installed at a location proximate to the building, and is operationally connected to the air handling system; and the water chilling system includes a moveable support structure comprising a support base on which a plurality of water chilling system components are affixed, the components including at least one water chiller for lowering the temperature of water from a high temperature to a low temperature. While moveable, such prepackaged chilling system is still expensive and complex to install.